Saturday, May 16, 2009

The disaster that is the current Republican party

It is common knowledge that as of the Republican Presidential Primary, the movement conservatives could not get the evangelical conservatives to get on board with either Mitt Romney or with John McCain. Both were conservatives, but neither was acceptable to the social conservatives. The excitement when Sarah Palin was invited to join the McCain ticket was purely among the social conservatives. The fact that she was and remains a wigged out fundamentalist who wants to set America up with a literal reading of the Bible as the fundamental law, overriding the Constitution when necessary, certainly turned off the rest of the conservatives. And that's all INSIDE the Republican party. The Independents are tending very much towards the Democrats.

So the Republican Congressional leaders are trying to mollify the radical conservative base just to keep their jobs. The result is that the Republican continue to lose the weaker seats. It's going to keep going. The head of the RNCC, John Cornyn, has said that the Senate Republicans will not keep the current 40 seats after the 2010 election.

Texas Senator Hutchinson is expected to resign her seat this fall to run for Texas Governor. Here seat will be competitive for the first time in nearly two decades. Arlene Specter has been forced out of the Republican Party by a strong movement conservative, Toomey, who was going to run against him in the Republican Primary in 2010, and although Specter could win the general election, he would have lost the Republican primary.

Now we get Utah Republican Gov. Jon Huntsman who had been considering running for President in 2012 who has resigned as Governor to take the job as Ambassador to China for Democratic President Obama. He is a highly competent and experienced conservative who could have attracted Independents and even some conservative Democrats if he had run for President as a Republican. For him to abandon that shot at the Presidency means he has given up on the radical conservative Republican Party.

There's more, of course. But that should be enough to demonstrate that the National Republican Party is shrinking and still headed downward. It is not going to recover before the next election, and probably not the 2012 election. After that, if the Republican base will allow new more moderate leadership to take over, then the Republicans might begin to recover. But that change in the attitudes of the base is unlikely anytime soon.

America just may begin to recover from the crazies who have been running so much of the federal government since Reagan was elected. Maybe. But it's going to be a slow project even now.

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